Priley Riley, Research and experiments for my ice sculpture, Ongoing since the 8th of March 2014

I have been researching and experimenting with ice as I intend on making an ice sculpture. My ice sculpture will be of the human chest and will have a real lamb heart frozen inside, and so it is important that the ice is transparent for the heart to be seen. 

 

For my first experiment I left the water to freeze in a container for 2 days, and the result was an opaque block of ice. I wondered if reducing the amount of freezing time would increase the chances of it being transparent so for my second experiment I reduced this time to just 5 and a half hours. When I carefully tipped the ice out of the container, I was left with was a very fragile casing of ice as there were a couple of holes on the outside of the ice and the water inside had not frozen, so had escaped out of these holes. The photo below is from my second experiment, where the heart could clearly be seen though the fragile casing:

 

Although it was fragile I considered this result a success because the ice could be seen through very clearly. Since then I have continued my experiments to find the perfect freezing time, between the times given to my first and second experiments, to achieve transparent ice that is not so fragile. The most successful experiment so far, shown below, was given 11 hours to freeze. The heart is clear and the ice casing is much thicker.